Let us note how other Countries, faced with a similar problem of being multilingual, had dealt with the situation.

• On attaining Independence, President Sukarno of Indonesia in around 1945 called together all the linguists of the many dialects spoken across his Country and asked them to come up with a common language and script for Indonesia based not on the Javanese language, spoken by most people of the country all in the Java region, but based on the Malay language more widely spoken by those out of the Java region. This was to prevent the dominance of the Javanese, something the Hindi purists in India should note. When the egos of each of these linguists came into play and they were ‘dilly-dallying’ over the importance of the task, he is reported to have ordered all of them confined to a University Campus till they settled the matter amongst themselves. This led to protests and outcry. But as the President was unmoved, they quickly got down to the task and within a few months arrived at an acceptable working form of the Country’s language- ‘Basha Indonesia’, using a modified form of Roman / Latin script. The language was further standardized in 1972.
• <President Sukarno was perhaps only following what another great Leader had done for his Country years before; President Kemal Ataturk of Turkey had standardized the ‘Roman Alphabet’ with suitable accent and diacritical marks or matras for Turkish.
• In India it is not possible or even desirable to resort to such drastic measures. But the objective is to be recognized as desirable and hence, a more consensual and democratic way is to be found to attain the objective. What could be more so than the fact that by default, if nothing else, the present situation where common usage has accorded such a status to two languages and the fact that there is a irresistible demand to recognize the importance of the Mother tongue and of Sanskrit. It is these languages that we discuss here after.
• In multicultural and multilingual Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew recognized that – “Many official and equal languages with English as the common working language is the only practical way. However, up to school level it would be good to have local language schools to instill the local culture in them.”
• Basha Indonesia, not only did away the hierarchy consciousness of the Java language wherein different words were used to designate or address people with higher or lower social status, but also, developed a simple and easy to learn grammar, allowing suffixes and prefixes to word roots to create new words with immediately predictable meanings, something as in Sanskrit.

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